Lady Gaga Wore Another Meat Dress

Lady Gaga Wore Another Meat Dress

File under “Things I never thought I would type more than once:” Lady Gaga wore a meat dress. Again.

-Lucia Peters

Lady Gaga has donned a lot of wacky fashions in her time, but the hands-down weirdest—and most distinctively Gaga—was the meat dress. Worn to the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards, the flank steak frock became the evening’s most talked about outfit the moment it made its debut. Even more impressive, two years later, we still haven’t stopped talking about it. Meat dress jokes abound left and right. It’s even got its own Wikipedia page. For reals.

And hey, guess what? She’s done it again!… Although this time, it may not have actually been made of real meat.

During her performance of “Americano” at Tokyo’s leg of the Born This Way Ball tour, Gaga changed into this little number. Unlike her first meat dress, Meat Dress 2.0 is short, with a sweetheart neckline, fitted bodice, and bell-shaped skirt. Photographer Terry Richardson captured the shot; though he may be somewhat questionable, he’s good buddies with Gaga and has been following her around during the tour, documenting it and whatnot.

Here’s the big question, though: What’s the dress made of? We can safely rule out raw meat this time round, but the jury’s still out on this one. Is it just cloth treated to LOOK like meat? This would be the most logical conclusion; however, Lady Gaga isn’t known for taking the easy way out, so it’s possible that it could be made of something else. For instance, what if it’s made of DRIED meat?

I know, I know; but hear me out. Consider how the original meat dress looks these days:

After she wore it, Gaga ended up donating the dress to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum in Cleveland. Before it got there, however, something (obviously) needed to be done to make it less, ahem, perishable—so it went to a taxidermist. Four months and a whole lot of chemicals later, the dress dried out, after which it was painted to give it that signature “fresh meat” look and sent off to the museum. Essentially, then, the dress has become beef jerky.

Is it just me, or does the new meat dress look just a little bit the way the old one does post-taxidermy? Also, is it a tad derivative to recycle such an iconic fashion moment when you yourself originally created it, or is it meta and genius?

Anyway, Gaga’s Born This Way Ball will be touring the world until March of 2013. She’s hitting Asia, Australia, and Europe this summer, Latin America towards the end of the year, and North America beginning in January 2013. Rock on, Little Monsters.